Have something to say?

Ready to be published? LXer is read by around 350,000 individuals each month, and is an excellent place for you to publish your ideas, thoughts, reviews, complaints, etc. Do you have something to say to the Linux community?

Not so sure...

I have 2 daughters myself, but I'm not so sure about the traditional hacker part.

I mean, I'm not one for subservience or anything, but very few people of any gender can do the lone wolf McGyver thing. I'm contemplating raising my kids to be "Intellectual Property" lawyers. If you can't become one of the hyperrich yourself, which I haven't managed, and I doubt my daughters will, you might as well suck as much money as possible from them.

@dinotrac, since it was the lawyers themselves that have managed to get us into this convoluted mess to start with, I think that it's pretty safe to say that they have proven themselves either incapable, unwilling, or flat incompetent to be the ones to dig us out of the hole.

We can look historically at the supreme court and it's lessers. Only in rather recent history have these courts been comprised totally of lawyers. Upon further examination it is within that same times frame that the situation in which we find ourselves now started to develop. So upon reflection, lawyers are the last people who should be involved in creating law.

> So upon reflection, lawyers are the last people who should be involved in creating law.

The inherent problem with lawyers creating law is that they tend to create laws it takes lawyers to understand.

The law was intended to be understandable by the common person (or at least the common person in whatever subject area the law dealt with). It no longer is. In fact, it's gotten so bad that there was a case in England recently where someone was prosecuted under a law which had been rescinded, and neither the prosecutor nor the judge knew it. If the supposed experts don't even know what the law is, what hope does the common person have?

Of course, what do you expect when the legislature is composed almost entirely of lawyers, and they don't even bother to read the legislation before they pass it? The health care reform bill is only the most recent example of this. It's been the default case for quite a while.

I'd love to see the various courts rule that any law which applies to the "common person", but can't reasonably be understood by them is invalid. But we both know what the odds of that happening are.

"I'd love to see the various courts rule that any law which applies to the "common person", but can't reasonably be understood by them is invalid. But we both know what the odds of that happening are."

The odds would probably be somewhere around the same as getting the tax code changed so we could understand it.

And if there's any justice in this world, we'll see a Bilski ruling today that throws out patents in which the "device" is only a mathematical formula. This includes all calculation sequences run on these glorified calculators we call "computers".

As far as raising a crop of "IP" lawyers: I make the kids watch a steady flow of "Matlock" re-runs. Then, I point out the absurdity of the FBI "Anti-piracy" warnings that the DVD player forces on us. Then we discuss how bizarre the unstated assumptions in all Tee Vee advertisements are.

It took me quite a while to decide on using the word "matter" for the substance thrown on the metaphorical wall. I'm nost at all sure I can stay within terms-of-service and answer that particular question.

Posting in this forum is limited to members of the group: [ForumMods, SITEADMINS, MEMBERS.]